The client thought so, too. That’s why Rodriguez had been hired in the first place. Truth be told, investigating high-tech corporations wasn’t his usual line of work. Mostly he got calls from lawyers, asking him to photograph visiting husbands on Waikiki cheating on their wives. And in this case, too, he had been hired by a local lawyer, Willy Fong. But Willy wasn’t the client, and he wouldn’t say who was.
Rodriguez had his suspicions. Nanigen had supposedly spent millions of dollars on electronics from Shanghai and Osaka. Some of those suppliers probably wanted to know what was being done with their products. “Is that who it is, Willy? The Chinese or the Japanese?”
Willy Fong shrugged. “You know I can’t say, Marcos.”
“But it makes no sense,” Rodriguez had said. “The place got no security, your clients can pick the lock and walk in any night and see for themselves. They don’t need me.”
“You talking yourself out of a job?”
“I just want to know what this is about.”
“They want you to go and find out what’s in that building, and bring them some pictures. That’s all.”
“I don’t like it. I think it’s a scam.”
“Probably is.”
Willy gave him a tired look as if to say, But what do you care? “At least nobody’s going to get up from the dinner table and hit you in the mouth.”
“True.”
Willy pushed back his chair, folded his arms over his ample belly. “So tell me, Marcos. Are you going, or what?”
Now, walking toward the front door at midnight, Rodriguez felt suddenly nervous. They don’t need any security. What the hell did that mean? In this day and age, everybody had security-lots of security-especially around Honolulu. You had no choice.
There were no windows on the building, just a single metal door. Next to it, a sign: NANIGEN MICROTECHNOLOGIES, INC. And beneath it, BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
He put the key in the lock and turned it. The door clicked open.
Too easy, he thought, as he glanced back at the empty street, and slipped inside.
Night lights illuminated a glass-walled entry area, receptionist’s desk, and a waiting area with couches, magazines, and company literature. Rodriguez flicked on his flashlight, moved to the hallway beyond. At the end of the hallway were two doors; he went through the first, and came into a new hallway, with glass walls. There were laboratories on both sides, long black benches with lots of equipment, stacks of bottles on the shelves above. Every dozen yards there was a humming stainless refrigerator and something that looked like a washing machine.
Cluttered bulletin boards, Post-its on the refrigerator, whiteboards with scribbled formulas-the general appearance seemed messy, but Rodriguez had the overwhelming sense that this company was real; that Nanigen was actually doing scientific work here. What did they need robots for?
And then he saw the robots, but they were damned strange: boxy silver metal contraptions, with mechanical arms and treads and appendages; they looked like what they send to Mars. They were various sizes and shapes: some the size of a shoebox, and others much bigger. Then he noticed that beside each one was a smaller version of the same robot. And beside that was a still smaller version. Eventually they were the size of a thumbnaiclass="underline" tiny, highly detailed. The workbenches had huge magnifying glasses so the workers could see the robots. But he wondered how they could build anything so small.
Rodriguez came to the end of the hall, and saw a door with a small sign: TENSOR CORE. He pushed it open, feeling a cool breeze. The room beyond was large and dark. To the right, he noticed rows of backpacks, hanging on hooks on the wall, as if for a camping trip. Otherwise the room was bare. There was a loud AC hum, but no other sound. He noticed the floor was etched with deep grooves in a hexagonal shape. Or perhaps they were big hexagonal tiles; in this low light he couldn’t be sure.
But then…there was something beneath the floor, he realized. An enormous, complex array of hexagonal tubes and copper wires, dimly visible. The floor was plastic, and he could look through it to see the electronics that had been buried in the ground.
Rodriguez crouched down to look more closely, and as he peered at the hexagons below, he saw a drop of blood spatter on the floor. Then another drop. Rodriguez stared curiously, before he thought to put his hand to his forehead. He was bleeding, just above his right eyebrow.
“What the-?” He’d been cut, somehow. He hadn’t felt anything but there was blood on his gloved hand, and blood still dripping from his eyebrow. He stood. The blood was dripping onto his cheek, and chin, and onto the uniform. He put his hand to his forehead and hurried into the nearest lab, looking for a Kleenex or a cloth. He found a box of tissues, and stepped to a washbasin with a small mirror over it. He dabbed at his face. The bleeding had already begun to stop; the cut was small but razor-sharp; he didn’t see how it had happened but paper cuts could look like that.
He glanced at his watch. It was twelve twenty. Time to get back to work. In the next moment, he saw a red gash open across the back of his hand, from his wrist to his knuckles, the skin spreading and starting to bleed. Rodriguez yelled in shock. He grabbed more tissues, then a towel hanging from the sink.
He ripped a strip off, and wrapped it around his hand. Then he felt a pain in his leg, and looking down saw that his trousers had been sliced halfway up his thigh, and he was bleeding from there, too.
Rodriguez wasn’t thinking anymore. He turned and ran.
Staggering down the hallway, back toward the front door, dragging his injured leg, aware he was leaving enough evidence to identify him later, but he didn’t care, he just wanted to get away.
Shortly before one a.m., he pulled up alongside Fong’s office. The light on the second floor was still on; Rodriguez stumbled up the back stairs. He was weak from loss of blood, but he was all right. He came in through the back door, not knocking.
Fong was there with another man Rodriguez had never seen before. A Chinese man in his twenties, wearing a black suit, smoking a cigarette. Fong turned. “What the hell happened to you? You look horrible.” Fong got up, locked the door, came back. “You get in a fight?”
Rodriguez leaned heavily on the desk. He was still dripping blood. The Chinese guy in black stepped back a bit, said nothing. “No, I did not get into a fight.”
“Then what the hell happened?”
“I don’t know. It just happened.”
“What you talking?” Fong said angrily. “You talk stink, man. What just happened?”
The Chinese kid coughed. Rodriguez looked over and saw a red arc was sliced beneath his chin. Blood flowed down his white shirt. The kid looked shocked. He put his hand up to his throat, and the blood seeped between his fingers. He fell over backward.
“Holy crap,” Willy Fong said. He scurried forward, looking at the kid on the floor. The kid’s heels were drumming on the ground; he was in spasm. “Did you do that?”
“No,” Rodriguez said, “that’s what I’m telling you.”
“This is a fucking mess,” Fong said. “You have to bring this back to my office? Did you think about it? Because cleaning this up is-”
Blood sprayed up the left side of Fong’s face. The cut artery in his neck pumped in spurts. He threw his hand over the wound, but it spurted through his fingers.
“Holy crap,” he said, and sagged into his chair. He stared at Rodriguez. “How?”
“No damned idea,” Rodriguez said. He knew what was coming. He just had to wait. He barely felt the slice at the back of his neck, but the dizziness came quickly, and he fell over. He was lying on his side, in a sticky pool of his own blood, staring at Fong’s desk. Fong’s shoes under the desk. And he thought, Bastard never gave me my money. And then darkness closed around him.
The headlines read THREE DEAD IN BIZARRE SUICIDE PACT. It was splashed all over the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Sitting at his desk, Lieutenant Dan Watanabe tossed the paper aside. He looked up at his boss, Marty Kalama. “I’m getting calls,” Kalama said. Kalama had wire-framed spectacles and blinked a lot; he looked like a teacher, not a cop. But he was an akamai guy, knew what he was doing. Kalama said, “I hear there’s problems, Dan.”